In August last year, Huffington Post CEO Jimmy Maymann was
promoted to oversee all of AOL's content and consumer brands.

That includes everything from TechCrunch, to AOL.com, to parent
company Verizon's video streaming service Go90.

We caught up with Maymann at the Cannes Lions advertising
festival this week to discuss how he's settling in, what big
plans he has for AOL, and his thoughts on some of the other
biggest topics in media right now - from the
Gawker/Hulk Hogan trial, to the recent
report on media agency rebates.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and
length.

Lara O'Reilly: You've recently moved into an
elevated role, looking after a lot more than just Huffington Post
now ...

Jimmy Maymann: That is correct. What happened
was, on the back of the Verizon acquisition last summer ... Tim
[Armstrong, AOL CEO] and I had a conversation with Verizon about
what we wanted to do on the content side of the business. Both in
terms of what we already have in hand ... but also where we
wanted to go.

The good thing, from my perspective, is Verizon acquired AOL not
only for the advertising technology - which has been rumored
that: 'oh, they were only interested in the advertising
technology' - they were very excited about the content part of
the business as well and how we could accelerate that even
further but to do that we needed someone to take
responsibility.

caption

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong.

At that point in time, all of our brands were pretty much
independent brands. And they still are to an extent. But now, me,
with an overview, at least I can reap the benefits and do the
things that actually make sense to do on a central level and make
sure we push the things to the brand edges that really need to be
distinct to a HuffPost or a TechCrunch or an Engadget.

We have three pillars: we have HuffPost; we have Hive brands,
which is all our independent brands, and we have AOL membership
and home, which is the traditional legacy AOL business, so to
say. So that whole structure has been made and now we are moving
to the next phase because we have put ourself in a place where we
are able to grow organically but also knowing that we want to get
to 1 billion people. That's not going to happen organically so we
are going to be more aggressive with M&A and with helping us
accelerate on the healthy platform we have.

O'Reilly: You were talking about the
distinctness of your brands. I read - and I can't remember
whether this was rumor or not - that you were looking to make
TechCrunch and Engadget more consumer friendly and less
distinctly tech business focused ...

Maymann: That is right, I actually gave an
interview at some point where we talked about TechCrunch in
particular, and also Engadget. What I talked about was technology
is having such a profound impact on everyone's lives today.
Whereas, if you think about TechCrunch and how it started:
TechCrunch was really a place that was for people interested in
the startup community

Obviously technology in general has become much more pop culture.
If you think about the HBO series "Silicon Valley," TechCrunch
was obviously heavily featured.

The interesting thing for us was we could see that it really
opened up a new audience, an audience we were not talking to
before. We are leaning into that in the sense that apparently
there is a huge interest in this space and therefore we said:
'OK, TechCrunch still needs to be true to its core, but at the
same time we can cover technology in broader terms as well, so we
have something that is appealing to that audience that is also
watching "Silicon Valley" on HBO.'

That obviously also opens up much more of the audience for us.
It's a limited niche audience if you're just covering new
startups and entrepreneurship.

Maymann:
That is our DNA but at the same time we can definitely do things
off the back of that, that will open up other doors where other
people can come in that really build on it, so I think that's a
fair way to look at it.

O'Reilly: Do you do that by acquiring talent, or
utilizing the talent you already have in different ways?

Maymann: What we have done is adding more people
covering new verticals or having a different approach to how we
cover things.

At the same time what we have also done with TechCrunch is we
have moved it much more aggressively into the physical space. You
obviously know the Disrupt series, we are doing the Crunchies,
and all these things.

For the Super Bowl, with NFL at Stanford, we did this huge
conference about the future of the stadium where we had
pre-selected startups that pitched new ideas to NFL. That was
obviously very, very interesting for them, for us, but also,
again, it was streamed to a broad audience and it was quite
interesting to see how broad these streams go right now.

O'Reilly: Talk to me about Facebook Live, then.
Lots of publishers are experimenting with it. Is it a worthwhile
investment? You might reach a lot of people, but is that
comparative to TV views? Facebook is paying publishers to
experiment with Live as well, one way of looking at that is:
great, some income. The other way of looking at it is: ah, now we
have to actually produce this stuff that we weren't doing on our
own platform. How do you view that gamble?

Maymann: I think for us it's not really a
gamble, we have actually been bullish on live ever since I was at
HuffPost. If you recall in 2012, we actually launched HuffPost
Live. We did eight hours of live and are still doing huge amounts
of live programming across HuffPost.

At the same time, also a couple of years ago, we launched Build,
which is our in-house conference series, and is streaming four to
six hours live every day.

We have actually been leaning into it before it became this huge
thing that it is right now, which obviously makes it easier for
us because we have a good perspective of what works across our
properties. We have huge streams of live content that obviously
we can take and put it across Facebook Live and other places so
it's not like we have to go and create something from scratch. If
you have to start from scratch, obviously, it's a bit of a bigger
gamble because you have to find your way and find out what
exactly connects with an audience.

It's not just Facebook Live. You've seen the huge rise of
Snapchat video over the past year, from zero to almost 10 billion
video views. So obviously, and it's a very, very different
platform from Facebook, right, it's a different way of doing
things ... different demos, different ways of activating these
people.

O'Reilly: I remember at Huffington Post you were
talking about this idea of personalization and this idea of
serving a different homepage to each user. Is that still
something you believe in? Does that work across the AOL portfolio
as well?

Maymann: Yes. So it is something that I'm a big
believer in because I can actually see that it's something that
allows us to deliver better experiences to the people that come
to our properties.

On any
given day across all our properties we have around 2,000 pieces
of content, so that's more than enough content. The thing is just
like when you go to YouTube, when you have 500 hours of content
uploaded every minute ... it's information overload. How do you
make sure you get the right content in front of the right people
at the right time?

I think that's where passive personalization really becomes key
because social media has been great in the sense that it has put
a spotlight on content would not necessarily draw big audiences.
But at the same time, when they arrive on Business Insider or
something else, they might arrive out of the feed, only for that
story, and then disappear so it's hit and run.

But with passive personalization what you're able to do all the
time is to actually give a better experience and give you
something that's relevant. When you arrive on this story, you
find something that's also relevant ... Then you get them into a
funnel and, a little bit like Amazon, without locking in, we get
better and better at predicting what you hopefully like and what
kind of content we should get in front of you.

From that perspective, passive personalization is getting more
and more important

Passive personalization is getting more and more important.

and is something that we have. We acquired a company called
Gravity a couple of years ago that actually sits in my portfolio
and works across all our content brands to optimize for this and
create better-personalized experiences.

Maymann: I did see the report and I think in
general the agencies we are dealing with, whether this is a big
issue, it's not something that we are seeing in general.

We have a very good relationships on the agency side and the
advertiser side. I think also you are at a point in time where
adding value to the advertiser's business is becoming clearer and
clearer so I think honestly it's something that will even itself
out. I don't think it's something that should be a big worry for
advertisers, at least not with what we are seeing.

caption

Jimmy Maymann.

O'Reilly: You
mentioned M&A might be an option for you this year. Where do
you need to fill gaps? What are you on the hunt for?

Maymann: We look at ourselves as a global
company and obviously we have done things to help bolster that
over the last year and a half.

We took over Microsoft's properties, to monetize those and their
ad sales team, which gave us reach and scale in markets where
we were not in. So we are now in 22 markets globally and I think
that matters if we want to be in the top tier from a
media/publisher perspective. We need to have scale and we need to
make sure we scale in the right kind of markets. So things that
can give us geographical scale is important.

But also we can go deeper in content verticals. There are a lot
of areas where I think we are doing pretty well. But there are
also areas where I think we can add some things that would add
tremendous value to our audience so from my perspective those are
the key things.

Then there might be technology plays or things that can help us
just like how Gravity can help us extract value in other ways.

In this Tuesday, March 1, 2016 file photo, Terry Bollea, known as professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, watches potential jurors at the Pinellas County Courthouse, in St. Petersburg, Fla., as jury selection began in his case vs. Gawker Media.

Maymann:
I think it's a highly debated case in the US. Obviously Gawker,
their editorial line has been very progressive, so to say, in the
way that they have gone after people. That being said, of course,
I'm not sure it's a good thing when you have people with very
deep pockets that are getting behind and trying to take down
media organizations.

I think media organizations are here to keep people and
organizations and governments accountable. When media really
works that's what media does.

Then I think also sometimes they can step over the line. But if
we start to take all media companies down that are
holding people to account, or being critical, then as a society
and as a democracy I think that's problematic. So that's my point
of view on that.

O'Reilly: Are you doing anything interesting in
the VR space?

Maymann: We are. What sparked out interest in
the space, five to six months ago
we acquired this company called Ryot which is an augmented
reality, VR, 360-immersion video company. It's run by this
amazing guy called Bryn Mooser who used to work at the Peace
Corps for 10 to 15 years, then saw what technology could do in
those areas and started to produce content ... and this year was
nominated for an Oscar award.

O'Reilly: How long until VR comes mainstream
enough for you to be able to make money from it?

Maymann: Obviously you can think about it the
way you just asked the question: everyone needs to have the
Oculus Rift or the Samsung Gear, otherwise you're not going to
really have the full experience. That's correct if you really
talk deep VR.

But already now we have 360 video, already now you get a very
very good feel without having to buy a unit or something to be
able to do it. Because if we had to wait for adoption of tens of
millions of people to buy Oculus Rift then obviously this might
be a play that wouldn't materialize for the next five years

Bryn showed how they had used $400 GoPro cameras to create these
kinds of experiences and that makes it very accessible to news
organizations, to individuals, to brands to go out to experiment
and create these kinds of immersive experiences. That's, in the
short term, very, very exciting and interesting. Then of course
eventually we will run around with Oculus headsets, but that's
not something that will happen overnight.

Since we acquired Ryot we have focused on integrating with
HuffPost so we now have VR equipment in all our 16 offices around
the world, we have the capability, so any given day we can go out
and shoot at 2-minute thing that we feel could connect an
audience better to a story. So that's the kind of commitment to
it.

O'Reilly: How much input do you get from Verizon
on the content side? Data? Go90?

Maymann: Go90 had a lot of content deals when we
were acquired and we are leveraging those content deals across
our owned and operated properties. So that's fantastic to get
some more premium content that you can share across to your
audience.

On the data side, they have 110 million subscribers, so marrying
that handset data with our first-party data across our 500
million people. Then also we acquired Millennial Media and they
have third-party data form 70,000 publishers, that gives you a
huge data set you can use to help drive better advertising but
also better content decisions.

O'Reilly: How do those deals work when it comes
to premium content? I imagine a lot of those were thrashed out
before the acquisition?

Maymann: You're right on that: some of those
things, it's easy to carry over, on other things we are in the
process of going back and renegotiating those things. Obviously
we have an interest in trying to line up all that content.